Heaven

I am traveling and have been bogged down in work for ten days (with an end in sight), but I thought I would mention a discussion in the On Faith forum in the Washington Post. Lisa Miller has a brief excerpt from her well-reviewed book: Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife. She writes: “I am a progressive in my heart, but I yearn at times for the discipline and faith of the orthodox. . . .When conservative Christians, Muslims and Jews talk about heaven, they often use the word radical to describe what they mean. The heaven that will come at the end of the world is a radical reversal of the social and natural order. The first shall be last, the meek shall inherit the hearth, the stars will fall from the sky. Heaven, for t hem, is not just love, its radical love; it's not just a return to the perfection of Eden, but a radical return. This is no warm hug, no easy train ride. It's radical because God is involved and God can do anything. While I do not believe in an intervening God, I do cling to the idea of heaven as a radical concept, a place that embodies the best of everything - but beyond the best. A belief in heaven focuses our minds on the radical nature of what's most beautiful, most loving, most just and most true. At the beginning of my book, I said I believed that heaven was hope. I would now amend that to say "radical hope" - a constant hope for unimaginable perfection even as we fail to achieve it. As Emily Dickinson said, heaven is what we cannot reach. But it is worth a human life to try.”

There are also reflections by Steven Prothero, Martin Marty, and Karen Armstrong. The link is here.

Looking forward to discussing liberals and radicals next week.

 

 

Comments

[Antonio Manetti]

While it's comforting and fun to speculate on the nature of Heaven, the more interesting and revealing speculations would be those on the nature of Hell.